Having just seen a section of a Ray Mears episode I’d already caught before, I wanted to check if he had done any filming in Kazakhstan. Simple enough, chuck in Ray Mears Kazakhstan to the search box in Firefox, and wait to see what gems Google returns. One of the entries looked interesting, so I opened it in a new tab, and checked to see what people had to say with ‘Bear Grylls or Ray Mears – who’d survive?” as the ecademy thread title. I was greeted with a “Join Now or Login to read all comments and to submit your own content, questions and comments.” message. Rather than register at every forum or knowledgebase that may or may not have useful information, I have two approaches to such occasions. The first is to return to the Google search results, and click on the Cached link at the bottom of most search results. This will then open up a page with what the Google bot originally found. This tends to effectively grant full access, as if the search engines can’t see the content, then search results aren’t likely to include the site.
Alternatively, if there is no cached version available, or if the site looks too garbled, I use the BugMeNot add in for Firefox. This checks their database for accounts that have been previously shared by other users, and if a match is found, you can log in without handing over your e-mail address to an organization you don’t know well.
If you use the second method, don’t forget that posting under that account is not a great idea, as anyone potentially has access to the same account, and may also alert the site owners to the fact that the account in question is not strictly genuine any more.

Alex has been a little in the real world recently, so her blog (Dryad Musings) is a little lacking in recent posts, but perhaps this will spur her on? Anyway, next year, her and her brother are hoping to go on a survival experience, and so when I read about an American survival TV show hitting the headlines for all the wrong reasons, I thought of Alex.
It turns out Bear Grylls had not in fact been roughing it every night for his ‘Man vs. Wild’ (‘Born Survivor: Bear Grylls’ in the UK) program, which many people had assumed after watching the show. He had in fact done his bits on camera, then some nights slept the night in a motel or hotel over night. I just hope they never do that sort of thing on Ray Mears’ Bushcraft shows – we catch them on BBC prime over here, quite a good show.